


Fragments of Being

by thebluefeather



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 07:32:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2142477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebluefeather/pseuds/thebluefeather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Tell me, Agent Laine, are you familiar with the one they call the Winter Soldier?” </p><p>---</p><p>Elisabet "Elise" Laine is an agent of HYDRA, and for as long as she can remember, she's had a plan.  But when she is assigned the Winter Soldier as her newest case, she realizes that James Buchanan Barnes was not part of her plans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (The title comes from a poem by Pushkin.)
> 
> This story opens prior to the events of Captain America: the Winter Soldier and shortly after the events of The Avengers. 
> 
> I've put any dialogue thats spoken in Russian in italics. Any English dialogue will be in regular text. This applies for the rest of the story.

Elise cursed under her breath as the swaying motion of the metro car beneath her feet nearly caused her to lose her footing.   Regaining her balance, she removed the hat she had shoved onto her head in her mad rush out the door that morning and began to braid her hair.  The pale blonde strands flashed under the flickering fluorescent lighting, catching the eye of a dirty-looking man with a patchy beard, and causing him to leer at her from across the crowded car.  Elise shuddered at his expression and cast her eyes in another direction.

She quickly tied off her long braid and replaced her hat.  The metro car was slightly heated, but the cold of November in St. Petersburg seemed to seep under her skin, making it impossible to get warm.  Although, the chill of that morning didn’t feel quite as penetrating as it usually did. She was warmed by the thought of the new assignment she would be receiving once she made it to the base; maybe this new job would be the break she had been waiting for, and she would come one step closer to her goal.  She could only hope. 

Cheered by the thought of one day taking down the organization she had worked for for two years, and known about for the past thirteen, she found herself with a slight spring in her step as she made her way out of the metro car, through the station, and out onto the snow-covered street. 

Despite it being a little after 8:00, it was still dark, and the streetlights cast an orange glow on the street and the people hurrying to work, just like her. She loved St. Petersburg, the city that had been her home for the first twelve years of her life, but she found herself missing the long daylight hours of Virginia.  She was a morning person, and she felt cheated by the endless darkness of the Russian winters.  It was the beginning of her third winter back in Russia, and though she was impossibly happy to be back in the city of her childhood, it was harsher and less forgiving than she remembered.  Perhaps the years of her youth were only remembered with more warmth because she’d had someone to come home to, whereas now she only had her cold, empty apartment and endless files from work. 

Shaking off her bleak thoughts, Elise ducked into the nondescript doorway that lead into a tiny teashop.  She nodded to Klavdiya Ivanova, the tiny old woman who maintained the shop as a cover for the organization that spanned several levels below.

 _“Morning, Klava,”_ Elise smiled as she unwound her thick scarf from around her mouth.  _“Cold today, no?”_

 _“I feel it in my bones, Lizochek,”_ the old woman replied with a dramatic shiver.  _“It’s good that I have my teas to keep me warm.”_

 _“It’s good that I have them, too,”_ Elise said as she took the lidded mug from its waiting position on Klavdiya’s desk. 

Klavdiya always had a mug waiting for her when she came in the mornings. Elise wondered if the sweet woman had any idea what sort of organization was operating right under her feet.

 _“Well, off to work with you, lovely girl. I’m sure they need your pretty face downstairs to brighten things up,”_ Klavdiya smiled affectionately and waved Elise on through the back door.  Elise blushed at the compliment, resisting the urge to unbraid her hair and hide behind it. 

With a last little wave to Klavdiya, she slipped through the back door and into a small storage room that held nothing but an empty set of wooden shelves against the far wall.  She pressed the button concealed on the underside of the middle shelf and waited patiently as the shelves slid to the side to reveal steel elevator doors. She swiped her ID card in the pad on the right, and then presented her right eye to be scanned for access.

Most agents had to present both eyes, but the injury in her left made it unsuitable for scanning.  She’d been so embarrassed when she was told that special allowances would be made for her on account of her injury; as if she needed to be told in just another way that it set her apart.  

A moment later, the small screen flashed with confirmation of her identity: _Agent Elisabet Laine._ A good Finnish name. Her lips curled into a small smile; her father had named her after his mother. She did not doubt that he would be proud of what she was doing.

When the elevator doors opened, she was greeted by an agent she had seen in passing, but whose name she did not know.  He nodded to her brusquely before stepping out of the elevator.

 _“Hail HYDRA,”_ he murmured as they brushed shoulders.

 _“Hail HYDRA,”_ Elise answered with practiced conviction and stepped into the elevator.

She pushed the button for Level 2, stepping out not a minute later into a sterile white hallway.  She often wondered how many times her father had walked down that same hallway, had greeted his fellow agents with the same _Hail HYDRA_ and sickening feeling in his gut. 

 _Enough times to drive him mad,_ her mind supplied unhelpfully. 

She swiped her ID to enter her office, a sterile little room filled with cabinets bursting with patient files and nearly three-dozen personal reference books. She hung her coat, scarf, and hat on the rack behind the door and settled herself into the chair behind her desk to wait for her appointed time to report for her new assignment.  She removed her laptop from her briefcase, placing it on her desk beside a small, potted yellow chrysanthemum and a photo of her with her half-sister, Amelia. 

The bright flowers brought a little color to the bleakness of her underground office. The photo reminded her that she was not alone.  It had been taken at the wedding of their cousin, Tricia, five years earlier.  Elise was eighteen, excited about heading off to college in the fall.  Amelia was fifteen, excited about her first boyfriend, if Elise remembered correctly.

The sisters had always been close, much to everyone’s surprise.  After all, Elise was the unwanted daughter. Left behind in Europe by their mother, raised half her life in Russia by her depressed, Finnish father. Quiet, sweet, and blind in one eye from a horrible accident—no one expected her to grow so close to loud, exuberant, and deeply adored Amelia.  But when Elise left Russia at the age of twelve and moved to Virginia to live with her mother’s family, Amelia had been her only comfort after the horror she left behind.  She missed her dearly. 

A small chime on her cell phone alerted her that it was time to make her way downstairs for her new assignment.  She removed her practical, winter boots and slipped on a pair of more professional heels, smoothed her hands once over her long braid, and grabbed a fresh patient notebook before leaving. 

She took the elevator down to Level 7 and felt a slight shiver of excitement as she watched the numbers tick by.  She’d never been lower than Level 5 before.  The levels of the HYDRA base in St. Petersburg were arranged in order of sensitivity, and she didn’t even know what sort of things she would find as deep as Level 7. 

She had worked for HYDRA for just over two years as a Psychologist to monitor agents and “assets” to make sure their brains were still functioning enough to make them the perfect, passive killing machines.  It was a disgusting occupation, but necessary. After many long hours put in over three years, including two summers, Elise had graduated a year early from Columbia University with a major in Psychology and a minor in Linguistics, and gone straight into a doctoral program and continued assisting one of her professors in their research on PTSD.  She’d been not a year in the program before she was approached by HYDRA and offered a job; she hadn’t needed to think twice before accepting. The offer to get inside the organization that ruined her father was too good to pass up, even if it meant basically signing away her life before it had really started.

She was only twenty-three, her twenty-fourth birthday just two weeks away, making her incredibly young for a HYDRA agent.  But her mother had been an agent before her death—or so Elise had been told—as had her father.  She’d grown up knowing about HYDRA from her father, and when she moved to the United States, her uncle, Alexander Pierce, had all but groomed her to join one day. It was only natural that she joined the family business.  And knowing what HYDRA’s mission was, she felt it was only natural that it become her ambition to take it down.  She hadn’t amassed anywhere near the amount of information she would need to inflict any damaging exposure on the organization, but she had plenty of time. She was optimistic.

The elevator dinged and she stepped out onto Level 7.  She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but the hallway before her looked exactly the same as all of the levels.  Feeling a little disappointed, she made her way to Room 703, swiped her ID and presented her eye for scanning.  Inside she found only a bare room—it looked like an interrogation room, maybe—with a steel table and a chair on either side, and only one other occupant.  All of the furniture was bolted to the floor.  _Well that’s new._

 _“Agent Laine,”_ her superior, Dr. Weisman, greeted without rising from his seat on the far side of the table.  _“Right on time.”_

 _“Dr. Weisman,”_ she replied with a respectful nod.

To be perfectly honest, the man terrified her, which was inconvenient considering he was her boss.  It wasn’t that he was a particularly frightening person, but there was something in his cool, gray eyes that made her constantly worried that he was about to confront her for all her secrets.  That he would accuse, rightly so, that she was not loyal to HYDRA and never really had been.

But he did none of these things, only placed a folder on the table between them that bore a small label in the corner that read: _ASSET 236._ Well, that didn’t tell her anything; she had dozens of similar files upstairs in her office.

_“Miss Laine, despite your young age, you have proven yourself to be more than capable in your field of work here for us.”_

_“Thank you, sir,”_ she replied, still eyeing the folder with interest.

 _“You have gained a reputation for being especially capable with the…rougher cases.  I suspect this is as much due to your talent as it is to your persevering nature and unflagging optimism,”_ he said with a wry twist of his mouth that suggested he found the aforementioned qualities somewhat distasteful.   _“With that in mind, I have a new assignment for you of a particularly sensitive nature.  If you agree to proceed, you may not discuss the information pertaining to this case with any of your colleagues other than myself.  The agents with clearance for Asset 236 are listed inside the file, and they are the only individuals permitted to have information pertaining to this case.”_

Was it her birthday? Christmas? She was being handed what was perhaps the most sensitive information she’d ever come across in her time with HYDRA, and it was practically gift-wrapped.  The thought crossed her mind that she was perhaps about to be in way over her head, but she dismissed it quickly. 

 _“I understand, sir, and I wish to proceed,”_ she said, trying not to seem too eager.

 _“I expected as much.”_ He made to open the file, but paused, fixing her with a hard stare. _“I’m taking a chance on you here, Agent Laine. Do not disappoint me.”_

He didn’t wait for her response before opening the file and turning it to her. She forgot to wait for permission before beginning to flip through the various documents inside. They were mostly medical records, sketches, engineering plans that were far over her head, and a list of dates and locations that held little meaning to her.  It was very clear that not all of the information pertaining to Asset 236 was in the file.  Always more secrets.

 _“I’m not sure I understand, sir?”_ she questioned, glancing up at him with her one good eye.

_“No, I wouldn’t expect you to. Tell me, Agent Laine, are you familiar with the one they call the Winter Soldier?”_

 


	2. Chapter 2

Born in 1917, captured and experimented upon by Nazis in 1943, and survivor of a classified near-death experience in 1945.  Kept in some sort of frozen state for much of the past seventy years to slow his aging.  Outfitted with a metal arm.  Most-prized assassin of HYDRA and even the Red Room for a time.  Dr. Weisman had skimped on the details, and Elise felt as if she was supposed to know the entire plot of a film when she’d only seen the trailer. She told him as much, and the Doctor simply told her that she knew only what was necessary for her to do her job.  She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to expose damaging details of HYDRA’s operation when she didn’t know any. 

But the Winter Soldier was still the sort of opportunity she had been waiting for because there was certainly one detail that reeked of the cruel machinations of an evil, secret organization.  They’d wiped his mind.  And then they did it again, and again, and again, and again.  It wasn’t any wonder that he required a psych evaluation before he could be dispatched for a mission; she thought it was miraculous his brain still functioned at all.  The mystery behind his resilience to a repeated procedure that should have made him brain-dead was just another detail she didn’t seem to have the clearance for.  Never mind her loose aspirations to somehow bring about HYDRA’s demise—she wasn’t even sure how she was supposed to do her actual job with only what was probably half the information pertaining to the case, but she would just have to make due.

Apparently, it was standard procedure with Asset 236 that he be woken no less than nine days before he was to be dispatched on a mission.  He had to work out the kinks of what was usually several years in cryo-sleep, become familiar with any advancements in weaponry that had taken place, and be cleared for duty by one of the psych agents. Dr. Weisman told her that there had been an incident some thirty years back in which another asset had become psychologically unstable and blew a mission so drastically that HYDRA itself was almost exposed.  After that, psych evaluations became standard protocol—that’s where Elise came in.

 _“So what is it, exactly, that I’m supposed to be doing to insure that 236 is fit for dispatch—sir?”_ Elise asked as she trotted down the hallway at top speed beside Dr. Weisman, trying to keep up with his long legs.

 _“You will be his constant companion for the next nine days, Agent Laine,”_ he replied without looking down at her. _“You will speak with him, ask him questions about himself and his missions. You will observe his weapons update training, and you will monitor his sleeping patterns.  Your goal is to ensure that—”_

 _“That all of the mind-wipes haven’t friend his brain, and he hasn’t begun to remember that he’s an actual human being?”_ Elise interrupted before she could stop herself.  She hadn’t even met the Winter Soldier, and she already felt that he must surely have one of the most miserable existences on the planet.

 _“You forget your place, Agent,”_ Weisman said coolly, and Elise ducked her head respectfully. _“But yes, that is exactly what your goal is.  Nine days, constant companionship.  We don’t want to miss anything.”_

With a flush of excitement, Elise began to wonder how much classified information she could glean from the Soldier in nine days.

 _“Sir,”_ she began cautiously, careful not to betray her intentions with her tone.   _“Will my time with 236 be…monitored?”_

Weisman’s lip curled slightly as he eyed her small stature.  _“Despite your lack of physical training, I can assure that you will not be in any danger, Agent. All facilities are video-monitored, and the asset is under orders not to use force against any HYDRA personnel.”_

Elise started; she hadn’t even considered her physical safety being an issue of concern. But he still hadn’t told her what she wanted to know.

_“And will you be—“_

_“Agent Laine, I have more important things to do than babysit you while you do your job; this is your case, and your case only.  You have a tendency to put others off their guard, making you the preferred option for this case. However,”_ he paused for a significant moment, _“I’m going ‘out on a limb’ by putting a young agent on such a sensitive case. Do not disappoint me.”_

Elise swallowed nervously at his commanding tone while simultaneously trying to hide her grin at his words.  She would not be monitored by anyone other than the idiots who kept an eye on the security cameras!  She had a full nine days to learn as many details as she could, and she was confident that after nearly seventy years of Red Room and HYDRA service, the Winter Soldier would have plenty to offer.  She just had to hope she “put him off his guard” enough to get him to reveal something useful. 

She was hopeful.  With her short, slight stature, and long baby-blonde hair, people tended to underestimate her. Not that there was much to underestimate—she was a psych agent, not an assassin—but it could only work to her advantage.  The feature that made her least threatening was her left eye.  A childhood injury had left her normally green eye clouded and sightless, and she still bore a thin scar that cut through her eyebrow and off into her hairline.  People tended to overlook and underestimate those with disabilities, a fact that could only work in her favor in this situation.  She was, if not the perfect spy, at least moderately gifted by traits that would hopefully work to her benefit. 

 _“Good luck, Agent,”_ Dr. Weisman said as he lead her to a room that bore the name ‘Lab 712.’ _“If you find you have questions that you simply cannot address on your own, you know where my office is.”_

 _“What sort of—er—state will he be in?”_ Elise asked uncertainly, eyeing the door in front of them.  There was a small window, but it was too high up for her to see anything but the ceiling of the room inside.

 _“He’ll have been removed from cryostasis,”_ Weisman glanced at his watch, _“And is likely having his vitals tested as we speak.  You may go in, Agent Laine, if you have no further questions.”_

Elise shook her head and used her ID and eye scan to open the door.  Lab 712 seemed like a standard medical experimentation lab; she’d seen a small handful of them since coming to work for HYDRA. In the center of the room, under a wash of harsh, fluorescent lights, a doctor and two nurses buzzed around a half-reclined chair. 

Strapped into the chair with restraints of a kind Elise had never seen before—she was no engineer, but the steel arm and leg cuffs looked to be electrically wired—was a man.  He stared up at the ceiling with a resolutely blank expression despite the needles that were periodically inserted and removed from his arms by the nurses and the steel restraints that looked to be biting painfully into the bare skin of his chest and arms.

His arms? His arm?  Dr. Weisman told her that he had a metal arm, and she had seen engineering sketches in his file, but nothing could have prepared her for what she was looking at.  It was an arm, clearly proportionate and shaped with identical muscle definition to his right arm, but it also looked more like a weapon than any gun—let alone prosthetic limb—she’d ever seen before. She watched the fingers twitch slightly with the same delicacy of movement she would have expected from an organic limb.  It was not her area of expertise, but she was sure that the arm was simultaneously the most terrifying and beautifully brilliant thing she had ever seen. 

It quickly became obvious that none of the room’s occupants had taken notice of her presence, so she cleared her throat awkwardly and tried to resist fiddling nervously with the end of her braid. 

The nurses and doctor immediately ceased their poking and prodding, turning to face her with open, respectful faces.  _Interesting,_ it seemed that she ranked higher than them in this situation. 

The man, or the Winter Soldier, or Asset 236—what was she even supposed to call him now that she was face to face with him? —raised his head slightly and fixed her with a cold stare.  She had expected his gaze to be that of a killer, hard, intense, and possibly murderous, but all she got were striking blue eyes that managed to somehow be as blank and empty as her own sightless left eye. 

Distinctly unnerved, she focused on the doctor instead.

_“Sorry to interrupt, Doctor…?”_

_“Vogl. Artur Vogl,”_ the Doctor offered eagerly, smiling at her with a soft, pleasantly open expression on his young face. 

 _“Right, Dr. Vogl.  I’m here as, as…”_ She wasn’t sure what the title of her position really was in this situation.  And the Soldier was still watching her with his penetrating, but lifeless eyes; it was decidedly unnerving.

 _“As Asset 236’s psych companion,”_ Artur supplied helpfully. 

She thought she saw the Soldier’s eyes flick towards Dr. Vogl and narrow slightly. Perhaps not so lifeless after all.

 _“Yes, I suppose that’s what I am. If you’re not finished, I can wait.”_  Elise gestured to the door and the hall on the other side.

 _“Oh, that won’t be necessary. We’re all done here, aren’t we?”_ Artur turned towards his nurses who nodded in response. _“He’s all yours.”_

Elise’s eyes flicked sideways to meet the Soldier’s at Vogl’s words. The gaze she met was more calculating than it had been just moments before.  She felt as if she were under a microscope.

She nodded. _“Thank you Doctor.  Nurses.”_ She offered a nervous smile to the nurses; she didn’t recognize either the young man or woman in the light gray scrubs.

After not a moment of further delay, Elise was left along in the lab with the Winter Soldier. _Right,_ she tried to drag her courage out from wherever it had decided to hide. _You’re just supposed to…get him to warm to you, get him to open up a bit.  Shouldn’t be too hard, Elise.  You’re friendly and disarming, right?_

 _“Hello,”_ she said nervously, nearing the chair. _“I’m Agent Elisabet Laine, but you can call me Elise.”_

She held out her hand for him to shake, but when he didn’t respond, she looked down and realized that his arms were still strapped into the chair.

 _“Oh! I’m so sorry!”_ she exclaimed, and began to search frantically for a way to release the restraints.

The Soldier didn’t say a word, only watched her fruitless attempts to free him.

“Damn,” she cursed under her breath in English.  Having spent her teen years in America, she often found herself swearing in English despite the fact that it wasn’t her first language.

“You speak English?”

Elise jumped nearly a foot at the ragged voice that came unexpectedly from the man beside her.  Had he really just spoken? In English, no less?

“I do,” she replied carefully.  “I lived in America for ten years.”

Maybe he would tell her something about himself now? That’s what a normal person would do.

“The release buttons are over there,” he said instead, jerking his chin in the direction of a touch-screen panel off to the side. 

Yep, definitely an American accent.  Brooklyn, maybe.  That certainly hadn’t been in the file.

“Uh, thanks.”

She pressed the release buttons on the screen and sighed in relief when a slight hiss sounded and the steel restraints snapped away from his arms and legs. She waited for him to undo the buckle of the thick strap that stretched across his chest himself, but he made no move to do so.  She ended up doing it herself—somewhat awkwardly as she was trying very hard not to touch his shockingly soft, warm skin. 

“All free!” she said cheerfully once she’d finished.

The expression on his face darkened slightly at her words, but she thought nothing of it. He pushed himself out of the chair and stood beside her, towering over her by over half a foot. He stood awkwardly, arms hanging limply to his sides and face expressionless.  He looked like he was waiting for an order.  _He probably is,_ she reminded herself.

She shifted slightly in the silence, and her eyes landed for the first time on the intersection of metal and flesh at the joint of his shoulder. The scarring was gruesome, and she had to force herself to tear her eyes away from it. 

“Well, uh,” she paused, casting her eyes around for a shirt, suddenly feeling embarrassingly distracted by his bare torso, but finding nothing to remedy the situation. “You can follow me.  We’ll be going to another room for a bit before you have weapons training.”

He didn’t respond, so she simply shrugged her shoulders, left the lab, and started off down the hall with the Soldier trailing dutifully at her heels. She led him to one of the interrogation rooms closer to the elevator.  It wasn’t technically an interrogation room, but the sterile decorations of blank walls and a standard table with two chairs all bolted to the floor made it hard for her to image it as anything else. 

They passed one of the Level 7 guards—she knew all the names of the guards on Levels 1-5, but hadn’t recognized any on Level 7 so far—and was suddenly struck by a solution to one of her more immediate problems. 

 _“Guard? Uh, sir?”_ He turned to her with a bored expression on his hard face.  _“Could you bring a shirt for—”_ She felt almost irrationally uncomfortable calling a human being that she had spoken with an asset _“—him?”_

_“To what room?”_

_“Room 701, please,”_ she asked politely.

The guard nodded and stalked off down the hall.

She led the Soldier into 701 and gestured for him to sit across from her at the table. She set his file and her notebook casually on the table, but made no move to open either. The pair sat in silence for a couple minutes until the guard returned with a standard-issue gray t-shirt.

Another forty-five seconds passed; Elise watched them tick by on her watch from the corner of her good eye.  She was normally good with people.  She was kind, friendly, but not overly so.  She wasn’t the most confident person, put her prevailing optimism usually prompted her to interact with others anyway.  

But now she found herself in front of the Winter Soldier with nothing to say.

“What should I call you?” she finally blurted.

“Call me?” he echoed, brows knitting slightly in confusion.

“Yes. I mean, what’s your name? It wasn’t in your file,” she continued encouragingly.

“The others called me 236,” he said without blinking.

Elise’s heart clenched in her chest.  236? That was how he thought of himself? As a number, not as a man.

“That’s horrible!” she gasped, unable to control herself.  “Surely you have a name?”

He stiffly shook his head, eyeing her as if she were some sort of dangerous creature.

“You just don’t remember,” she said firmly.  “Well, you sound American, so maybe I can guess, and you’ll know it when you hear it. ”

She pursed her lips as she thought of the boys she went to high school with in Virginia, and then the men she had known in New York.  She needed good, American names.

“Maxwell?” she said hopefully.

“No.”

“Hmm. Jayden? No, how about Aiden? Logan? Eli?”

He looked at her blankly.  This tactic clearly wasn’t working; she had to think about this logically. He was American, spoke with a slight Brooklyn accent that she recognized from her time at Columbia, he was _born in 1917._  Of course, he was practically ancient. She needed a more classic American name. 

“Bill?”

“No.”

“John? Steve?”

He blinked suddenly, a strange expression flashing across his face.

“Steve?” she pressed excitedly.  “Is your name Steve?”

“No…” he said uncertainly, his features shifting so much that for a moment he looked like an entirely different person.  “Not _mine.”_

She flipped open her notepad.

 _Steve, someone important?_ She scribbled hurriedly in Finnish, the only language she knew that none of her superiors understood.  She didn’t want anyone reading her notes on this case.  _Brother? Friend?_

“Okay, we can do this,” she assured him.  He looked mildly amused, but motioned for her to continue. “William? George?”

“No.” He shook his head to both.

“James?”

He inhaled sharply, his breath echoing off the bare walls.

“Is that it? James? Is that your name?”

As she watched, the hardened expression melted from his features to be replaced by something so warm, so _something,_ and Elise was suddenly struck by a wave of familiarity.  _I know you,_ she wanted to say.  But she didn’t because the next moment it was lost, and she was left wondering if she had only imagined the feeling that she had seen those blue eyes somewhere before.

“I—I think it is,” he whispered, his voice ragged.

His hair still hung long and tangled around his shadowed face, giving him the look of a haunted man, but there was the faintest presence of something in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.  She liked it very much.

“Well,” she sighed, immensely pleased with herself.  “When it’s just us, I’ll call you James, ok?”

She felt a true, honest smile splitting her face. 

James nodded uncertainly.

“On one condition, James.” His eyes met hers, dimming in…disappointment? “You just have to call me Elise.”

“Ok…Elise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the Marvel comics, Bucky was born in 1925 and Steve in 1920, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe is doing things a little differently. Taking that into account, I’ve taken some liberties in intertwining the two different back-stories. This isn’t particularly relevant yet, but please remember this going forward. If you have questions, just leave me a comment!


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